Joseph Belbruno Blog

  Hello, this is Kenji presenting the latest edition of our #techAsia newsletter from Tokyo. The FIFA World Cup came to an end with Spain's magnificent victory in a nailbiter of a World Cup final against Argentina early Monday in our time zone. But the heat of competition was quickly replaced with a less enjoyable kind of heat, as Japan's most intense wave of high temperatures so far this summer struck after the annual rainy season ended in most of the country. My hometown of Nagoya and its surroundings in central Japan's Tokai region have been hit the hardest, with temperatures reaching 40.6 C in Kuwana on Wednesday and 40.3 C in Tajimi on Tuesday. Japan's tech sector heated up as well, starting with a visit last week by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Tokyo. Huang showed up at an izakaya, or Japanese-style pub, in the downtown area of Kanda. Gathered there were top executives from Japanese chip, electronics, chemical and material companies, such as Kioxia, Tokyo Electron, ...

  Nvidia’s $750 Billion Deals Revive Fear of AI Circular Financing Jensen Huang departs after speaking at the Nvidia GTC conference in San Jose. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Save Translate 7:51 Takeaways by Bloomberg AI Nvidia Corp. is working on a fresh round of AI infrastructure deals potentially worth more than $750 billion, accelerating a streak of investments that skeptics warn is artificially inflating demand and valuations across the industry. An artificial intelligence initiative with the parent of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc. unveiled late Friday is worth more than $500 billion, Nvidia said. The world’s most valuable company is also in discussions to provide a guarantee of as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing from a US data center project, in what would be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer. While critics have for months warned of the circular nature of such agreements — the companies Nvidia finances and ...

China deploys divide and conquer tactics on EU trade Europe risks full deindustrialisation unless it stays united, warn analysts Financial Times Europe27 Jul 2026JOE LEAHY PETER FOSTER ANDY BOUNDS Brus sels’ decision to tar get one of China’s most fam ous dishes, Pek ing duck, for ananti-dump ing cam paign was a cue for Chinese pro pa gand ists to engage in one oftheir favour ite pas times: EU bash ing. “Why is ‘European duck’ so afraid of ‘Pek ing duck’?” said the Com mun ist Party’snation al ist tabloid the Global Times, refer ring to EU accus a tions this month thatPekin duck, the meat used in the dish, was fattened up with state sub sidies in Chinabefore being dumped in Europe. The paper said Europe’s ducks were let down bythe bloc’s “high energy costs and fra gile sup ply chains”. As the EU battles China’s grow ing trade sur plus, Beijing is resort ing to what ana lystssay is a time-tested play book — attack ing Brus sels, which sets trade policy for thebloc and wields its col lec...

No Stimulus in China China’s stock market rescue last week provided the latest evidence that the 2024 rally sparked by the Communist Party’s “whatever-it-takes” pivot had run out of steam. It needs another artificial jolt. Big boosts from Beijing have in the past stimulated the entire global economy — most notably in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008. But it would be unwise to count on help from that quarter this year. Buying by the so-called national team of state-controlled investors instantly put a floor under a dismal run for Chinese equities, particularly technology stocks. Policymakers’ intention is clear — boosting technology’s competitiveness so that it can rival the US and drive growth that shores up living standards.  Yet, as in 2024, the durability of this intervention remains uncertain. Weakness in consumer demand is undermining growth, even as exports — which stepped in after the collapse of the property market — continue to surge . Does another Beijing...

  OBITUARY MARY- DELL CHILTON| 1939- 2026 She Was Known as the Mother Of Genetically Modified Crops She led the research team that produced the first transgenic plant but had little interest in becoming the spokesperson for GMOs BY JON MOOALLEM In 1970, Mary-Dell Chilton was a perseverant but underemployed chemist teaching parttime at the University of Washington in Seattle— a position she’d leapt at only because, after months at home caring for an infant, she was desperate to get back to work. One of her students gave a presentation about a recently published paper about a tumor-producing disease that affected grapes, stone fruits and other crops. The paper claimed that a common soil bacteria, Agrobacterium tumefaciens , was actually transplanting its own genes into the DNA of the affected plant—genes that, once expressed, spurred the growth of those tumors. “I just absolutely did not believe it,” Chilton recalled. In the 2018 book “Seeds of Science,” journalist Mark Lynas wr...